When I was a child, I saw with blinded eyes.

White sheets by my side down my living room aisle.

Human porcelain came to life and lip-gloss gave me years.

Plastic plugs clipped on my ears, a lollipop took away tears.

Pairs of socks stuffed into my shirt, toes sink into giant shoes.

Little pink frills upon my skirt and a piece of rubber to chew.

Pink cotton fluffs propped up on sticks, games that I never lose.

Magic tricks and vanilla splotched cheeks,

No sickness a mother couldn’t soothe.

 

Sunflower fields and golden wings around my head.

Bare feet pitter-pattering, when I believed everything said.

When a penny was a lot and money had colors.

Boy was the world nice then!

Tucked into bed with a goodnight kiss,

to awaken to a reality without mend.

 

Empty spaces during dark phases,

the world just cries and wails.

No white horses, just fifty percent divorces,

a world full of broken fairy tales.

Ripped pages and dried ink, the fantasy is now the past.

Tears at the brink from this reality, breaking the heart like glass.

Dying trees, unknown disease, and an education that always fails.

So next time you see a little girl with wings, underneath her golden veil.

Just keep passing by; it’d best be wise, to not say a single word.

Just hope she doesn’t open her eyes,

peaceful and undisturbed.

 

For being a child is a luxury,

she deserves the sugarcoated lies.

At least for a while, at least for some time,

Let the poor girl taste the sweets.

Because as she lives and the pages all end,

that’s all it’ll ever be.

A sweetness with a bad after taste.

Just a nice sugar coated dream.

 

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 4/30/2006, edited 4/30/2015

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

Wow, I wrote this almost an entire decade ago! I found it and realized I had written it the same day as today, except it was 2006. I thought it was meant to be published here today. This was originally inspired by a quote from the bible and my dark afterthoughts at the time. I was purposely aiming for that nursery rhyme feel.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, felt like a child, reasoned like a child: when I became a man, I put from me childish ways

1 Corinthians 13:11